yeah that's a fair point. Garage DJs tend to rinse the same 30 tunes. But yeah, those 30 tunes are superior to basically anything that came out of future garage/postdubstep.

SIDENOTE: I'm sure you won't agree/empathise with me here but I've noticed that dubstep proper has completely died out as something me and my formerly dubstep worshipping mates dig out of the crates to put on at gatherings. I guess that's the nature of the music itself, which always worked best in a pitch black club with speakers shaking the shit out of you... Same reason, in fact, that we don't listen much to jungle!

Garage OTOH never dies out. Probably, again, cos its suitable for sitting around chatting as well as dancing, its upbeat, unchallenging etc.

ALSO: does this 'scene' still exist? I would say the music I've heard which carries on that dubstep path of atmospheric sub-bass workouts would be the stuff on Livity Sound by Peverelist, Hodge and Kowton.

Bashmore, Binga, SBTRKT and couple others from this time went on to cross over careers didn't they and seemed to be headliners long after I tuned out of the whole thing. There was an amount of awful awful Burial bandwagoning but the odd moment too with some of the blunted robots stuff and probably lots I'm forgetting. 'U Cheated', 'fatherless' were always a great club track but truth be told I suppose the whole thing never lived up to the benufo, bokbok, Oneman, etc sets that birthday the whole thing. Most producers, withas a few exceptions, were only really finding their feet and the 'lower the tempo, up the groove' approach was the beginning of a lot of stuff since. The dubstep bubble bursting is probably a thread in itself but given the word parasites has been mentioned I wouldn't say it was all one way and the latter part of the era definitely brought a bit of broken beat and open mindedness to the eternal house and techno monoliths.

ALSO: does this 'scene' still exist? I would say the music I've heard which carries on that dubstep path of atmospheric sub-bass workouts would be the stuff on Livity Sound by Peverelist, Hodge and Kowton.

I don't know how wide you want to go in answering this question, but here's my high level take on what happened to the different post dubstep trajectories...

The Hessle guys got very established in the wider house & techno circuit. included here in this cluster are people like Hodge, Bruce, Tessla, Untold, maybe even Objekt. A bit like the arc of the dubstep/techno hybrids from appleblim, 2562 etc, most of their stuff sits closer to the H&T axis now. they're all pretty successful; on a different level.

That arc/trend is indicative of lots of what has happened. Livity (Kowton & Pev etc) have similarly established themselves in the H&T circuit, while bringing through traces of the dubstep past into those arenas. I like all the guys above but find what they do now too close to H&T for my sets personally.

Loefah's Swamp camp has sorta swung the other way, as far as I can tell from radio. During the earlier Boddika-dominated era, I found the Swamp stuff more techy & housey, albeit drum-machine influenced but recently a lot of that camp seems to have converged into darker stuff again, esp Lamont & Chunky and their use of MCs (Kwam, T man, Grim Sickers). as i understand it some of the swamp camp have begun Swamp-affiliated labels, most notably Madame X with Kaisen. To me this stuff is now closer to what we've been doing with Keysound in the last 5 years (me+dusk/wen/parris/beneath/130 etch/facta/walton etc), though right now personally i'm not focused on just dark stuff. Pinch's Tectonic has released a bunch of good 12"s in this space too.

A new label i'm excited about is Jelly Bean Farm, run by Ganesa out of LA. Squane is a key artist on this label. Their stuff sits between what we do and Swamp/Kaisen. they did a mix for our keysound show this week. very focused, dark, rolling. it wont be to everyone's tastes, esp the vocal/flava/ukg/house n g gang, but it certainly has focus.

Then of course there's an entire cluster of people that parris & beneath are more associated with: idle hands, berceuse heroique + Ancient Monarchy, batu's timedance - with acts like lurka, laksa etc. there is a lot of activity and releases in this cluster right now and i hear of a lot of this stuff out. several of them talk quite a lot about doing things in a "uk" way, by that i take it as a heuristic for bassy, dubstep-diaspora traces, as a point of differentiation from the broader techno thrust but i find they are often as excited about acts like kassem mosse and beatrice dillon than anything specifically bassy or with different drum patterns (snares!) than off-4x4. broadly i can't hear the "uk" distinction as much as is claimed and it often just feels like off kilter techno to me, or at least it's in the realms of diminishing returns.

This is our Rinse show from monday, probably a better way of hearing what I'm talking about & the Jelly Bean Farm mix:

There's a few other clusters but they start to feel quite distinct with different trajectories and values, related perhaps only because they emerged during the period: the night slugs/fade to mind/GHE20G0TH1K and all the stuff in this documentary. Then there's the weightless stuff pioneered by logos & mumdance's different circles, which connects back into noise & avant classical ways of stretching the sound palates from grime.